330 
SOUTH SEA 
Islands, and bid adieu to those remote scenes but seldom 
visited by Europeans, except the daring and wandering 
whale fisherman, or some enterprising spirit searching 
for unknown lands. 
We bid adieu, as it were, to a primitive world, exist- 
ing in all its rude, uncultivated state. We could not 
avoid reflecting, when beholding the scenery of this 
remote region and the strange manners of its inhabitants, 
upon the varied nature of mankind, and the vast dif- 
ference between the cultivated refinement and advance 
in the arts distinguishing our own distant home, and the 
manners of the aboriginal savages around us, who, 
although possessed of lands and climate far superior to 
the steril regions of the north, were but little advanced 
beyond the brute creation ; while the European, from 
a similar condition, had in a few centuries raised himself, 
by his inborn energy, high in the scale of intellectual 
cultivation. Where are we to seek the cause of this vast 
difference ? I know not ; and who would dare assert 
that all the advantages of intellectual power shall be for 
ever confined to the white portion of the human race, 
and that the swarthy inhabitants of these remote islands 
will not at some distant period reflect a portion of the 
image of the Divine mind, that formed and governs them 
as well as us. 
As we still continued to sail along the shore, wildly 
ornamented as it was, with its tall forests, its luxuriant 
herbage, its romantic, its picturesque beauties,— we 
thought of the solitary being whose hut appeared alone, 
situated in some shady nook or rocky glen. Surrounded 
i 
